A Tiger's Heart (Caitlin Reece Book 4) by Lauren Wright Douglas

Author:Lauren Wright Douglas [Douglas, Lauren Wright]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Kidnapping, Indigenous, Lesbian, Murder, Remote Island, Private Investigator, Victoria, Canada
Publisher: ReQueered Tales
Published: 2023-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

I sent Lester home with Gray to make sure she really was all right. He had specific instructions to heft forkfuls of hay for the bay pony and do any of the other fetching and carrying Gray required. Amazingly, she agreed. I’d been clobbered on the head myself and recalled vividly the percussion section that had played inside my skull for days.

I fed my own menagerie, and while a pot of coffee was brewing, I scrambled a few eggs. With a lined yellow tablet in front of me, I sat at the kitchen table nibbling toast and making a list of the things I needed to do. I was well into it when the phone rang so I plucked the receiver off the wall with more than a little irritation. If I was ever to catch up with Ratliffe, I couldn’t waste time chatting on the phone.

“Sweetie,” a tenor voice cooed. “You’re soooo hard to find!”

“Talk to me, Francis,” I said, heartbeat accelerating.

“What a naughty fellow your Kirk Ratliffe has been – ever so many arrests and convictions.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Francis. Something that will help me find him. Pronto.”

“So testy, so importunate,” he chided. “Very well. Is your pencil poised?”

“It is.”

“He left a paper trail across Canada. Mostly gasoline purchases. Although he did spend over three hundred dollars at an outdoor outfitter on the mainland. Oh. you may be interested to know that this particular credit card is actually a debit card for a small brokerage account. Apparently his mother puts a certain amount into the account monthly. Isn’t that nice?”

“Continue,” I said between clenched teeth.

“You’re fearsome when you’re like this,” he said. “I’m positively quaking. But I shall continue. His most recent purchases were in Chemainus. He bought two meals. Today.”

“Two meals? You’re sure it wasn’t three?”

“I am most definitely sure,” he said, miffed.

Two meals. For himself and Jory, I guessed. But what the hell was Ratliffe doing in Chemainus? That was, oh, fifty miles up island.

“Anything else?”

“And he bought two ferry tickets. Destination – Thetis Island.” Two ferry tickets. What further proof did I need?

“Thetis? There’s nothing there. What the hell could he be up to, anyhow?”

“Well,” Francis said loftily, “there may be nothing for him on Thetis, but there might well be on Ciel Island.”

“Ciel Island?” And then it hit me, what Jory had told me: “He said we’d go and live in Heaven.” And ciel was the French word for heaven! Yes. He’d taken her there.

“Yes. The Ratliffes own it. It’s about a mile or so off the north tip of Thetis. Apparently they leased it out to a silver mining operation during the fifties and sixties, but it’s deserted now. I found two newspaper stories decrying the deplorable state of the silver mine – the caves and tunnels are in dreadful disrepair. There’ve been numerous mudslides and cave-ins. Seems the sea is working very hard to stake its claim to the mine. And several spelunkers got lost there and were never found.

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